2017 Digital Libraries for Musicology workshop most successful to date

Over 60 scholars gathered for the 4th International Digital Libraries for Musicology (DLfM) workshop, organised by researchers from the e-Research Centre.

Dr Kevin Page returned as Programme Chair for the workshop he co-founded in 2014, this year with David Lewis as Publicity and Proceedings Chair.

Through the generous support of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, DLfM 2017 was held on their campus in central Shanghai. Professor Yandi Yang, Vice President of the Conservatory, served as Local Chair for the workshop, ably assisted by organiser Dr. Jihong Zhang. The Conservatory is the oldest higher education institution for the study of music in China, with DLfM being hosted during a month of events marking the Conservatory's centennial celebration.

In addition to the attendance of musicology scholars travelling internationally and from within China, DLfM 2017 was held shortly after the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (MIR) conference, with numerous music technology researchers also making the journey from nearby Suzhou. As Dr Page noted in his introduction "DLfM demonstrates the significant contributions made by MIR technologies when applied to digital musicology and, most importantly of all, provides a venue for scholars from all of these institutions and communities to come together and engage in interdisciplinary debate and collaboration".

The workshop programme consisted of 13 long and short papers advancing the state of the art in Music Digital Libraries, presented under four topics: structuring & connecting Music Digital Libraries; understanding corpora; approaches to accessing content within archives; and studies specific to voice collections. The proceedings for these papers are available in the ACM Digital Library, including one on the 'Musicology of Digital Libraries: structures in RILM' given by Centre researcher David Lewis.

The programme was rounded out with a poster session and a panel on Future Music Digital Libraries. Panellists included Anna Kent-Muller, an alumni of our Digital Musicology workshop at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, and Dr. Hongjie Sun, a visitor at the University of Oxford China Centre in 2016 through a collaboration with the Centre's Cultural Heritage Programme.